In this workshop, faculty, staff & students from across the health sciences will learn models and tools for translating their research for different public readers (local, state, national). We will discuss the motivations for translating science to a wider audience—including policy work, advocacy, and public education— as well as the challenges in doing so. Using examples from a variety of health-related sciences, we will walk attendees through the translation process and encourage them to think flexibly about how they might adapt their writing based on the context. The workshop will have interactive activities throughout, but we will also reserve the last 30 minutes for extended work time to further develop the workshop’s ideas and for attendees to receive real-time feedback. Participants will walk away with having started the work of translating sections of their own writing as well as an argumentative model for their research they would like to translate into public science writing.
Given the current challenges to science funding and support, attendees may come to the workshop with a topic in mind they feel passionate about addressing. If not, we will build in time for them to develop one.
- Why translate our research?
- Some of the difficulties of translation
- Length (scientific research is long, requires enormous expertise and labor): op-eds are short (500-700), require 0 expertise except attention and reading
- Selection, synthesis, the wider culture
- You must not only be selective because of length requirements and low-expertise of readership, but must also attend more to the cultural/social MOMENT than scientific research
- Sense of immediacy in op-ed writing that may be foreign to scientific writing
- Non-specialist readership understands value differently than experts in your field
- Rethinking audience and value; or, it’s not about you!
- Case studies (from gold standard research to public conversation)
- Large scale concerns: categorize your last paper using one of the moves by Mark Gaipa and categorizing arguments
- Small scale concerns: removing jargon, translating titles and figures, summarizing paragraphs
- Workshop mode – Make it a tweet, abstract, or mini-pitch
- Brainstorm publications that might be a good fit
- Talk about what you might want to include in a pitch
Patrick Bonczyk, PhD – Writing Across the Curriculum + Writing in the Disciplines, Coordinator
A musicologist by training (PhD UCLA), Patrick works at the intersection of musical instruments, animal culture, and the history of science and technology. After completing a graduate certificate in writing pedagogy at UCLA, he taught in the writing programs at NYU Shanghai, Princeton University, and NYU (NYC). At UC Irvine, he similarly operates in the spaces between artifacts, practices, and disciplines: in this case, coordinating writing resources, individual faculty, and academic units. As WAC+WID Coordinator, Patrick oversees key programs, including the UCI Writing Pedagogy Certificate, a university-wide workshop series on teaching writing that refreshes every term, a competitive research program for graduate students engaged in IRB-approved writing pedagogy studies in their home disciplines, a podcast with fresh insights on teaching writing and communication in higher-education, and creating digital teaching resources that affirm or create relationships.
Nora Bradford, Graduate Writing Consultant, The Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication
Nora (she/they) is a 5th year PhD candidate in Cognitive Science. Her research focuses on our ability to think about our own thoughts, abilities, and perceptions. She’s interested in understanding how that ability (“metacognition”) transfers from task to task. Before grad school, she worked at UPenn as a lab manager and studied neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy at UChicago. Outside of her research, she’s a passionate science journalist, usually writing about new neuroscience findings for outlets like Scientific American, National Geographic, and Science News. She has also dabbled in script writing for podcasts, a science museum TikTok account, and a PBS show.
